For the 59th Venice biennale The milk of Dreams Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga created the immersive artwork Terrarium which imagines sand as a political substance. Kiwanga’s interdisciplinary work is highly influenced by her academic background in anthropology and comparative religion. Using methods and approaches from academia, Kiwanga incorporates political and social themes in her praxis. The work Terrarium is based on the artist previous work Plot, a site-specific work for Haus der Kunst in Munich, which works with themes of imperialism and botany. Like Plot, Terrarium works with themes of nature and manipulation of its being to serve human desires throughout history. In Terrarium the 19^th century glass boxes used in Victorian times to transport botanical rarities across the world now contains sand, a political and culturally potent material, as the raw material for glassmaking, a by-product of the oil industry and as a symbol of an increasingly arid planet, on display between transparent curtains. The work was supported by Kvadrat.